The theory is that when you upload a video directly to Facebook, the video will be shown to a higher percentage of fans, while also resulting in more shares, likes, engagement, and of course, views. The reason for this is because FFF:

Video views on Facebook have gone up exponentially in the last 6 to 12 months. Preferential exposure is being given to videos that are directly uploaded into Facebook, as opposed to being linked in from YouTube or Vimeo. These videos must be opened in a separate YouTube or Vimeo app, rather than just being viewed directly within the news feed.

Pat’s experiment showed that the Facebook video perform way better than sharing a Youtube video on Facebook. Pat stated:

It’s easy to see that Facebook, by far, crushed YouTube in terms of views and engagement. In a perfect world, I’d be able to A/B test directly on Facebook with a YouTube link versus a direct upload – but even without that it’s easy to see (especially when compared to the engagement and views on my previous video from 2 weeks ago), that we should all be posting videos directly to Facebook to reach the most people possible.

Based on Pat’s experiment I decided to give it a try with a short video that I shot.

The Stats From the Group That I Shared It With

The group that I shared the video with is very active and has between 100,000 and 200,000 members in the community.

One aside…the Facebook community is very active. A lot of people post pictures all day long.

Very few people post videos, and most of the videos are low quality – shaky with bad sound.

Here are the stats from the group.

Almost 300 likes and 62 comments. It was the first time I posted in the group, too.

The group is passionate and welcoming to everyone.

The Stats From the Facebook Page

Here are the stats from the Facebook Page for my niche site. The post was not boosted, but the reach is still pretty good.

The reach is totally organic. The likes and comments are low, but the shares are very promising.

It’s nice that people watch the video, but who cares if no one looks at the website.

The Traffic Impact

Yes! It worked.

There are more people going to the niche site as a direct result of the video. There are a few people signing up for the email list, too.

That is the real goal, in this case: attract traffic using high-quality content and offer the visitor a content upgrade in exchange for an email address.

It is a little early to tell if the process will provide an ROI. It only took a short amount of time to get the video done, and there was no ad spend.

Even if the visitors don’t convert directly to customers, that is okay. It still gets the website name and the Facebook page out in front of new eyes.

Doug Cunnington

Interesting stuff Doug! I’m blown away by the amount of views you got!

I recently recorded a Google Hangouts video on the niche site that I’m trying to build as well. I’m trying to have that rank in Google for my keyword as it will likely rank before my site will.

I hadn’t thought about posting it on Facebook yet but that might definitely be worth a shot. Do you typically use your personal Facebook account for these types of promotional activities or do you have a separate account set up for them?

Sorry but if you have to create a video with 25.000 views to get 70 visitors to your site… that’s a bit inefficient is it? Even if it only took you two minutes to make the video I bet that you got a bit lucky there and that it would be very difficult to repeat this day-to-day.

Hey Stefan, Great comment. So 2 things: 1. Experiments that have negative results are still useful because you can see what works and what doesn’t work. In this case, yeah, it’s inefficient but interesting. I prefer organic search traffic from Google since it’s constant.

2. If a person has a new site that isn’t ranking yet and they enjoy making videos, then this might be a cool thing to do.

I wasn’t proposing that Facebook videos are the newest way to generate traffic or anything like that.